


In a Sky Full of Stars

by Kanthia



Series: rain's a part of how life goes [3]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: F/F, Gender Dysphoria, Pangender Avatar, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-12
Updated: 2015-02-12
Packaged: 2018-03-12 00:07:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3337334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(I think I see you.) A story about stories, and Asami prepares a gift for Katara. (Spoilers)</p>
            </blockquote>





	In a Sky Full of Stars

“His phallus,” Varrick says. “Y’know, the meat sceptre. The gizmo. Love dart. Member. Poker. Dongle. Purple veined love warrior. His --”

“--That’s enough.” Asami’s certain her face is bright red. “Katara, you don’t have to do this if it makes you uncomfortable. I just thought --”

“--That sounds like a lovely idea.” The two of them look up, surprised; Katara’s smiling the warm sunny smile of someone who knows how to help. “Asami, come with me. Varrick, if you’ll let us have our privacy.”

As it turns out, Katara has little skill with a pen or paintbrush -- Sokka got all of that in the family. But her waterbending is an art all to itself, and Asami has prepared the extract of a certain jungle tree mixed with blue dye for this particular occasion. “It remains supple after it hardens,” she says, watching in awe as Katara begins to build the object from the tip down. “We’ve found a variety of -- body-safe colours. Future Industries is patenting the process, but it was, um, Varrick’s idea to use it for the production of, uh, various --”

“Sex toys? Remarkable, truly. In my day we used blown glass.” Katara laughs at the look on Asami’s face. “Oh, don’t be so upset. I was young once, you know.” Then she knits her brow in concentration, and sticks out her tongue. “How close to the original would you like this to be?”

“It doesn’t have to be exact. Just -- enough, that Korra feels like it belongs on her body.”

Katara returns to her work. At times she closes her eyes, trying to recall details, and Asami wishes she could have Korra’s help, only this is a gift, and that would ruin the surprise.

“Aang came into it slowly,” Katara says, after a while. “Not that the Airbenders were celibate, far from it, but they had certain ways of celebrating intimacy that ran against what some of his other past lives believed in. Relationships within the monasteries were open, you know. They raised their children as one. He never knew his birthfather or his birthmother, but that suited him just fine. He --” She clears her throat. “-- He was getting older, and I was getting older, and we had Kya and Bumi, but we were -- scared, and angry, because we felt beholden to the world in a way that no young couple should. It’s nobody’s responsibility to have children.” She smiles, suddenly, wistfully. “One night he entered the Avatar State, while we were -- otherwise connected, and he spoke in a voice that I think was Yangchen’s, about duty and fear. I was soon pregnant, with Tenzin.”

“That’s --” Asami has nothing to say. Katara is so old and so wise, and imagining her young and angry and scared is hard. “-- I’m sorry, I guess.”

“Ah, but love should never be an affliction. You’ll learn that in time. Korra will need you, but you’ll need her, as well. It’s finished.”

It’s a blue dick. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

 

* * *

With a little ingenuity and a few leather straps it’s perfectly functional. Varrick wants the Spirit Vine (trademarked, of course) rolling out by the dozens, but like hell Asami will let him so much as look at her girlfriend’s wang, and leaves him with the suggestion that he make an imprint of his own, well, package. 

(He loves the idea. Still calls it the Spirit Vine, and Varrick Global Industries is ready to go by the end of the week. Puts the first one he produced up on his office wall, elbows Asami and points towards his obviously very pregnant wife. “We did the thing,” he says, waggling his eyebrows, and earns himself a slap across the face and a peck on the cheek.)

Life and responsibilities call and Korra is mediating a dispute on her birthday. She’s trying to teach the world that they don’t need a literal empath, a physical bridge in the shape of a person, to be empathetic themselves; it’s not easy. There are too many people hoping to fill a hole they think Kuvira left. Azula dies in prison, well-fed and solastalgic, and the ceremony to honour her life is messy. Zuko is distraught and Izumi is pleased to see her go.

“How do you do it,” Asami asks, that evening, as they sit on a balcony of the Fire Nation Royal Palace. Korra’s speech, _On the Victims of War_ , had been a rousing success. “How do you speak so nicely about someone who caused so much pain?”

“I wasn’t being nice. I just thought about who I’d be if I was her. Who I was when I was fourteen. She wasn’t a good person, Asami, but that doesn’t mean her life never meant anything.” She cracks a small smile. “You helped me understand that.”

Asami smiles, back. “You’re not talking about _me_ , are you?”

And Korra laughs, and Asami laughs, and the grief over what has brought them there is like a cool breeze in the desert: refreshing, and clean. The two of them retire to bed -- a fancy bed with a flame-red canopy, so unlike the hammocks they wove in the Spirit World, but comforting nonetheless. Asami takes it out.  
  
“Happy belated birthday.”

Korra unwraps the package slowly, then gawks at it for what feels like eternity.

“It’s, um, Katara helped make it,” Asami mumbles.

Korra turns it over in her hands, then holds it to her pelvis. Her eyes widen. “Oh,” she says, understanding spreading throughout her, sparkling, glowing. “Oh, I get it.” She laughs. “Asami, it’s wonderful. You’re wonderful! Can we use it now?”

Call it euphoria, or self-love. Korra is a hundred thousand different things, and bringing them all together is so beautiful it makes Asami want to cry. That’s the Avatar State: everything at once, past, present, and future. Raava had no reason to care about humans but learned to love them in time, and that understanding is beauty in and of itself. Korra’s eyes glow white, and she speaks in Raava’s voice about being glad to have lived long enough to meet Asami, and their world is lovely, for a night.

(It feels more real in her than something made of rubber has any right to be. She wonders about bringing people to the spirit world to come into themselves, and if the Mother of Faces would be that kind, and if Korra is bending her own energy, or if this is someone else. Then Korra kisses her and reaches down and Asami’s mind goes blank as the ocean. The spirits are kind. Asami is not pregnant, come morning.)  
  


* * *

Korra meditates, often, but she is not mindless; her mind is on everything. Asami grounds her, with patience, and with great love.

“The Guru was wrong,” Korra says, one evening. She’s sipping tea that Asami has made her, still sitting cross-legged. “When he told me to let go of earthly attachments, what he was trying to get at was that I needed to love everything, not that I needed to love nothing. Does that make sense?” 

“I think so.” She wonders if Korra’s referring to Laghima, and Korra seems like she’s in the right place to be asked such a thing.

Korra shakes her head, no. “When I still had Aang. When I was still Aang, there was a man named Pathik. I felt -- there was something he was trying to tell me, back when I was first trying to enter the Avatar State.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Yeah.” It’s a little late, but it’s still good.  
  


* * *

“I’m not mad at Unalaq,” Katara says, as she raises a small ridge on the underside of the shaft, a pretty little vein. “At least, not angry at him for taking Aang. I’m angry at him for hurting Korra, and for putting the whole world in danger, but I can’t be angry at him for taking Aang, because Aang could never be taken from me.” She smiles. “Asami, death is not the end of life -- people die when they are forgotten. Perhaps some day when you reach my age you’ll hear news of the Avatar born as an Earthbender, and you’ll understand.”   
  


* * *

 The Ember Island Players put on a terrible rendition of _The Boy in the Iceberg_ as part of a two-day festival to introduce their newest play, _A Republic City Love Story._ It begins with Lin and Tenzin’s tempestuous affair, continues through a confusing second act where it turns out Bumi -- that is, Aang’s son -- was masquerading as Amon to teach everyone a lesson about friendship, and the play insists on a four-way love affair among Team Avatar that includes a fling between Bolin and Asami. It doesn’t help that Mako’s actress seems to have difficulty portraying her feelings towards Bolin’s actor as brotherly. It ends with Asami (a large-breasted actress whose schtick is suggestively talking about the size of her brain) tearfully proposing to Korra (the same actor who played Toph) while standing on top of Kuvira.

“That was awful,” Mako says, afterwards.  
  
“I thought it was pretty accurate,” Bolin says. “Varrick consulted on the script, you know.”

“My arms aren’t _that_ big, are they?” Korra says, shoving her hands into her armpits.

“I like them just the way they are,” Asami says, squeezing Korra’s bicep.

Much later, after Asami spends a few hours teaching Korra exactly how much she appreciates Korra’s size and shape, they lie side-by-side, panting, a little embarrassed at what just happened. Korra peels off the strap-on, then rolls to her side.

“Hey,” she says, dreamily.

“Hey yourself,” Asami says.

“Hey, Asami.”

“Yeah?”

“When did you know? About -- me, I mean.”

Take a world at the end of mythological times: that is, new ways of telling the old stories, myth giving way to things called facts. The Gan Jin and the Zhang were both right, but Wei Jin and Jin Wei never played a game called Redemption, and in time they might have collaborated on enough history to learn that the Avatar’s old legend was a lie. That’s a terrifying way to run a world; we are a narrative species, and the breakdown of the story is a kind of trauma, but at least there’s always the Avatar to guide people home.

Amon and Unalaq and Zaheer and Kuvira -- and Ozai, too, who was taught that progress is a gift to be given through force, like a sword, or a scar; and Hou-Ting in her palace of stone, and Varrick with his factories rolling out strap-ons and war machines -- they were all right, in a way, for trying to find an answer to the question, _but what do we do now_. They all knew that if you give people hope they will follow you, but leadership without kindness looks suspiciously like evil, and it took Raava ten thousand years to learn empathy. Sure, at the time she called it self-preservation, but when the world needed her most, she came back.

“I don’t know,” Asami says. “I mean, I kind of hated you, because of Mako, for a while. But all of the sudden it was there, you know?” Love, that is. Tenzin named his sky-bison after it: oogies, Sokka’s pet name for affection.

“Yeah, I know.” Understanding, that is. And love is a kind of understanding. “Hey, Asami.”

“Yeah?”

“Now that the spirit portals are open, do you think there will be more spirits joining with people? And more people who are reincarnated when they die?”

“Maybe.”

“They’ll need someone to help them.”

Asami smiles. “Perhaps.”

“Maybe someone to guide them through the Spirit World. To reconnect with their past selves.”

“And exactly who,” Asami says, tapping Korra on the nose, “Do you propose to do that?”

“Stay with me forever,” Korra says.

She’s past, present, and future; she’s all four nations at once. Korra is human and spirit, bender and nonbender, small fears and existential dread. She makes Asami feel like anything is possible, like the future is a place worth seeing, and Asami loves her with a fierce love that will be immortalized in much more than terrible stage plays.

That’s what the lion-turtle meant, when it spoke of bending the energy within ourselves: balance is about finding harmony with oneself, and bending is about finding harmony with the world. It’s not much, but it’s enough, life; and the world goes on and on and on and on.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are always appreciated. You can also find me at [tumblr](http://kanthia.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
